DescriptionThe Utah Arts Festival presents a wide variety of performing, visual, and literary arts, and seeks to present the best Utah artists and their contemporaries worldwide. The Festival presents several core events annually: an Artists Marketplace, a Performing Arts Program, Urban Arts for youth and teens, Demonstrating Arts and Fear No Film, an independent film festival. The Festival augments these core events each year with new and creative programs, artists, performances, and site elements, thereby ensuring each event is an innovative and unique celebration of the arts. Large scale visual or musical installations have become a signature of the event. To preserve its reputation for artistic excellence, all artistic work presented by the Utah Arts Festival is either juried or curated by professional artists and arts administrators.
The Utah Arts Festival’s programming emphasizes contemporary art.The Utah Arts Festival’s emphasis on contemporary art implies a willingness to accept artistic risk by presenting artists, forms and subject matter that are innovative or non-traditional, provided that work is seen to adhere to critical standards of aesthetic quality and overall artistic integrity. In all artistic media and genre, the Festival encourages among its patrons an appreciation of and interest in fine art. The Utah Arts Festival fosters the creation of new artwork through competitions and commissions to artists and desires, whenever possible, to be a premier venue for introducing artists to Utah audiences. The Festival also values the interaction of patrons with artists, and seeks to provide opportunities for dialogue and education, both within the artistic community and between artists and the general public.